How AI is Changing Job Ads: A Conversation with Copywriter Mitch Sullivan
A job board should help recruiters attract the right people with the right message. The way job ads are written is changing fast, and with AI now reshaping recruitment marketing, understanding what makes an ad effective has never been more important.
To explore this, we sat down with Mitch Sullivan — a former recruiter turned specialist copywriter who’s trained thousands of recruiters on writing better job ads.
In this Q+A, Mitch shares his journey from sales into recruitment copywriting, why most job ads fail to engage the best candidates, and how AI can now help recruiters create stronger, more persuasive job ads in minutes.
Can you tell me a little bit about your copywriting background, and what brought you into the world of HR and recruitment?
Before I got into recruitment, I was in sales for about 6 years. My first few recruitment jobs were specialising in placing salespeople and sales managers.
In my 2nd recruitment job I received some basic training in writing job ads and it ignited a skill I believed I already had - which was writing.
Over the next several years I developed this skill through practice and reading books on copywriting. Within 10 years I got good enough at it for my job ads to account for over 80% of my placements.
I then adapted this skill when email, social media and outreach messaging arrived.
So, were you still working as a recruiter at this time? When did you move into a world where you were being paid by others to help them with their job ad copywriting?
I was a full time recruiter between 1988 and 2015, with 4 of those years working inhouse. I stopped working on contingency in 1999.
I started Copywriting for Recruiters in 2016 and it took off quite quickly. First 5 years was running 1 day courses all over the UK and launched it online in 2020.
When did you start to see the opportunities in using AI to help your customers better and what have you launched to do this?
Building my own AI agent first crossed my mind around Oct 2023 and for various reasons delayed doing it for another year. I needed convincing that recruiters spending money on training was a thing of the past, given what's happened in many sectors. Plus, a lot of them had lost their jobs - partly due to AI - so I decided I had no choice.
I had to repackage my decades of experience and training into a new format - and AI was the only logical choice.
So now, instead of spending hundreds of pounds and months practicing their new skills, I've created an agent that writes the ad for them, immediately and for a fraction of the cost.
What problems with job ads can this AI product solve? And what are the typical pitfalls recruiters make when writing job ads?
The typical pitfalls recruiters encounter when producing job ads is a combination of things.
1. They don't assess the state of the market for the job they're trying to fill. If it's historically easy to fill or they're confident there are enough qualified active job seekers out there, they can often get away with just posting the JD. The downside is it will probably get an unmanageable number of unqualified people - mostly caused by them not reading it.
2. If they know it's historically tricky to fill and still just post the JD, they're hoping to get lucky - which they will do around 25% of the time. Most recruiters (both sides of the fence) do this and most cite 'lack of time' and/or 'too many jobs' to work on as the reason. These are the types of jobs that need to persuade those people who aren't desperate to read the job post. That's when the JD needs to be turned into a job advert. All of my job ads over the past 25 years have had a fill rate of around 85%.
3. Those recruiters who make an effort to make the job post readable and attractive, do so by starting the ad by talking about the company. I assume they do this because they think who or what the hiring company are is what most candidates will be primarily interested in. However, what most candidates are primarily interested in is themselves - especially the best ones, or "top talent" as recruiters like to call them.
My AI agent solves the problem of the best candidates not applying by making the job ad readable - because it speaks directly to the candidate's self-interests. For most people that use it for the 1st time, it will produce the best job ad they've ever produced. And it will do it in 10 minutes at a cost that makes it easy to apply the same methodology to all their job marketing.
> Thank you to Mitch. If you would like to try Mitch’s AI agent then you can, and your first ad will be free.
Follow this link: https://mitchs.ai/
Find Mitch on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitchsullivan/